Finding Pvt. Clark: Childhood letter

This grainy photo is of Wayne Clark as a boy. It looks as if he is holding a puppy.(Photo: Photo courtesy of Leah Woods)

In many respects, Wayne Clark is elusive.

Since starting this project in June, I've found no one who remembers actually speaking to him, no one who served alongside him in the 89th Infantry Division, no one who grew up with him.

We've heard him speak through a couple of handfuls of letters, and we've heard the stories of people who themselves were told stories about Wayne. We've learned what he was carrying when he was killed in Germany in April, 1945. We know the devastating effects that his loss had on his children and other family members.

When I fill in the dots, I imagine Wayne to be a quiet man, earnest, hardworking. I think he worried a lot. I think growing up during the Depression and with parents who would eventually divorce at a time when divorce was unusual had a profound impact on his life. Maybe that spurred him to be kind and sincere and mature for his age.

I'm projecting. But a letter from Wayne as a boy seems to bolster my general idea of the kind of guy he was, even though it was written when he was kid, before the Depression, before the divorce, before the war that would end his life. This letter comes to me from Nancy Green Kayhart, a daughter of Laurence Green and Delia Clark Green, Wayne's sister.

I've attempted to reconstruct the letter as close as possible to the original. There are plenty of typos in it, but it was written in 1928 by 10-year-old Wayne to Delia, who would have been 8. It was typed, not handwritten, in Menasha on the back of a Menasha Paper Mills Company invoice. This is unusual, I think, because typewriters were expensive in the early 1900s and not readily available. I wonder how Wayne got access to the typewriter.

Wayne Clark was 10 when he typed this letter to his sister, Delia, in 1928.(Photo: Letter courtesy of Nancy Kayhart)

Kayhart, a retired teacher, is stymied a bit by the note as well.

"I'm pretty sure that Wayne sometimes worked with his dad at the paper mill; probably no child labor laws at that time," Kayhart wrote. "It was obviously summer."

According to a story on Wayne's death in the Wausau Daily Record-Herald in 1945, Wayne was born in Mosinee. But he and Delia spent much of their childhood in the Waupauca area. Their mother, Pansy, worked at the King veterans care facility, likely as a laundress. The time in Waupaca, Kayhart said, was "the best part of my mom and Wayne's childhood."

This letter shows a boy who cares for his sister, who is smart, and maybe a little bit more of an adult than what a typical 10-year-old should be.